The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question
Web3 advocates promise decentralization on an unprecedented scale. Excessive centralization can stymie coordination and erode freedom, democracy, and economic dynamism—decentralization is supposed to be the remedy. But the term on its own is too vague to be a coherent end goal. Getting the job done takes the right kind of decentralization, and we worry that Web3 is thus far heading down the wrong track.
Divya Siddarth is associate political economist and social technologist at Microsoft, the RadicalxChange Foundation, and the Ostrom Workshop.
Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the author most recently of Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus.
E. Glen Weyl is the founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, political economist and social technologist in Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, and coauthor with Eric Posner of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
